Obituary: BASIC co-inventor Thomas E. Kurtz passes away

On November 12, 2024, Thomas Eugen Kurtz, professor of mathematics and known as the co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, passed away "peacefully" at the age of 96. This was reported in an obituary from Knox College in Illinois, where Kurtz earned his first academic degree in 1950.

Born in 1928, Kurtz later completed his doctorate at Princeton and then taught at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he developed BASIC together with John Kemeny and Mary Kenneth. The language was developed as part of the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), an operating system for sharing computer resources to enable all students at the university to use computers. DTSS allowed several users to work on one computer at the same time – was a novelty at the time. BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was intended to make it easier for students to access computers, as it had a much simpler structure than the languages commonly used in the early 1960s, such as FORTRAN or ALGOL. The name of the language was also its program: "We wanted a word that was simple but not simple-minded," explained Kurtz in retrospect. The fact that the university decided to make the language available to the general public free of charge contributed to the rapid spread of the language.

The first BASIC program was launched at Dartmouth on 1 May 1964 (the language celebrates its 60th anniversary this year) and consisted of around ninety lines of code. BASIC originally consisted of fourteen simple commands such as PRINT, LET, IF, THEN, FOR, NEXT, INPUT, END and GOTO, which was despised by developers but helpful for beginners. It creates confusing spaghetti code for longer programs. Edsger Dijkstra, a pioneer of structured programming, complained in 1975 that it was almost impossible to teach good programming to students who had previously come into contact with BASIC.

True and Microsoft Basic

BASIC spread rapidly in the hobbyist computer scene of the 1970s, and the first microcomputers also used it. Bill Gates and Microsoft started their careers in 1976 with the commercial Microsoft BASIC, a few years before MS-DOS. However, the latter contributed to the further spread of Microsoft BASIC from 1981 onwards, as the programming language was an integral part of the operating system. More and more commercial and free dialects of BASIC were created, the list on Wikipedia is long, and not all of them suited the taste of the inventors. Kurtz and Kemeny therefore decided to launch their own version, True Basic, in 1983. This had more modern, more structured elements such as IF ... THEN ... ELSE, DO ... LOOP or EXIT DO to avoid the GOTO trap. It was designed from the outset to be cross-platform for DOS/Windows, Mac and Unix/Linux, but was not particularly successful in sales. It can still be purchased today via the website.

In the nineties, BASIC became increasingly less important than languages such as C and Pascal. Microsoft also moved further and further away from the original with Visual Basic, until a final break occurred with Visual Basic .NET in 2002.

In 1988, Kurtz withdrew from public commitments and devoted himself to teaching mathematics until his retirement in 1993. He is survived by his wife Agnes, 3 children, 9 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren.

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